The expanding worlds of artist Tiffany Lawson

Tiffany Lawson started the journey to new exhibition “What If I Told You It Was Freedom” nearly three years ago, its shape and direction influenced by everything from the songs that wormed their way into her head to the books she read with feverish delight, and in particular the collected works of Toni Morrison, which Lawson has taken to revisiting in recent years.

“And what I really got to see reading back through them as an adult is [Morrison’s] genius,” Lawson said in late July from Streetlight Guild, where her latest exhibition will kick off with an opening reception on Friday, Aug. 1. “And I wanted to, in a way, mimic that. I wanted to learn from her excellence in how to build a character, how to tell a story, how to generate nuance. Basically, how to build a world.”

This idea of world-building led Lawson to craft on a larger scale than she had previously attempted, with some of the pieces on display at Streetlight stretching up to five feet in length. It’s a size practically demanded of the big, complex ideas contained within the East Side arts space, Lawson’s collected works touching on time, legacy, gentrification, violence, erasure, redlining, art history and more.

Witness “The Books Blew Black,” which the artist described as a jumping off point for this particular body of work, and which has roots in her discovery of a 2019 report by Columbus Landmarks centered on African American settlements in the city, elements from which are collaged into the background of the striking work. “You can see the Carl Brown grocery store, and then the American Addition settlement is there, and the Lincoln Theatre is over in the corner,” Lawson said in directing my attention. “In a lot of ways, Columbus hasn’t done a good job of keeping African American history, and the city has sort of cherry-picked which legacies to hold up and which ones have kind of faded. … In Columbus, you’ll hear about Poindexter Village or Linden, which is great, but there’s so much more history than that here.”

Asked if she viewed her artistic role in part as preservationist, Lawson essentially responded “yes, and,” going on to link her practice with everything from celebration to memorial.

“I think it also gives me a chance to shine a light on things that are fading, in a way,” she continued, pointing to the inclusion of miniature, individually assembled tomes that appear in both “The Books Blew Black” and “Book Fairy” (initially displayed as part of an exhibition celebrating the 150th birthday of the Columbus Metropolitan Library) as just one in a number examples of this. “We’re at a point in time when a lot of people don’t read … and libraries are losing funding. I grew up in the library. It was my greatest babysitter. We’d go to Parsons, and in the summer my mom would take us to the main branch and Topiary Park, where she knew precisely what time the sprinklers would come on and we could run through the water.”

Still other works hold space for those more corrosive societal aspects that refuse to release their concrete grip on our world, including “Greased Watermelon,” which is rooted in the violence that has been omnipresent throughout human history and which Lawson has witnessed most recently in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. “You ever hear of that game? Greased watermelons? I was a lifeguard from high school through college, and there was this game we used to play in the pool where you greased up a watermelon and divided yourself into teams with the goal to get the watermelon from one end of the pool to the other,” she said. “And it becomes this constant tug of war, because it’s impossible to get it to the other side. And … that became kind of an allegory for war.”

Another smaller scale diorama, which the artist created by staging two previously created pieces next to one another inside of a repurposed dresser drawer, began to evolve into more of a neighborhood story, Lawson said, with a miniature clothesline strung across the piece representing a myriad of divides. “There’s a film I watched called ‘Drying for Freedom,’ and it talked about the emergence of the electric dryer and how it basically became a cultural divide, a racial divide, an economic divide,” she continued. “And even now it’s very much a thing, where there are whole neighborhood associations that won’t allow you to have a clothesline.”

Placed within the larger exhibition, the diorama also has the effect of teasing out the myriad untold stories playing out in the apartment buildings and towers spread throughout other works, as though Lawson has zoomed in on just one of hundreds of concurrently unfolding scenes.

There has always been an element of storytelling in Lawson’s art, which early on surfaced in the invented characters who popped into her mind and subsequently found their way onto her canvases. But here this concept takes on a massive new scale, with pieces such as “Yonder Dreams” unfolding over decades, a trio of panels tracing the history of the Dunbar Theater from its pre-construction promise through its dilapidated final days.

One aspect of Lawson’s artistic character present in all her work but particularly resonant within “What If I Told You It Was Freedom” is her intentionality. In creating “Greased Watermelons,” for instance, she became aware that she needed more time to process the ideas contained within, and so she cut and set each blade of grass individually, extending the hours she spent with the piece and enabling her to exit the process with a better grasp of its meaning. Similarly aware that viewers might need to sit with it longer than other works, Lawson built additional three-dimensional elements into the piece, creating visual pockets in which people can and should linger. 

Elsewhere, the decision to coffee-stain the maps she used in creating “Shadows in the Valley” adds another layer to a work that explores themes of racial migration and displacement, the artist’s research uncovering a deep connection between the coffee industry and slavery and colonial exploitation. While a number of the scenes depicted across the board take place at night, which Lawson attributed to most of her creative work taking place after hours, but which comes to symbolize an idea present throughout the space that time is running perilously short.

“With what we’re dealing with in America, where libraries are being cut, arts are being cut, we’re at an all-time risk,” Lawson said. “Humanity is at an all-time risk.”